Précis of Upheavals of Thought*

Abstract

Emotions shape the landscape of our mental and social lives. Like the geological a traveler might discover in a landscape where recently only a flat plane could be seen, they mark our lives as uneven, uncertain, and prone to reversal. Why and how? Is it because emotions are animal energies or impulses that have no connection with our thoughts, imaginings, and appraisals? In the passage from which my title is taken, Proust denies this, calling the emotions geological upheavals of thought. In other words, what changes the Baron's mind from a flat plane into a mountain range is not some subterranean jolt, but the thoughts he has about Charlie Morel, a person who has suddenly become central to his well-being, and whom he sees as inscrutable, undependable, and utterly beyond his control. It is these thoughts about value and importance that make his mind project outward like a mountain range, rather than sitting inert in self-satisfied ease. Upheavals argues that emotions are evaluative appraisals that ascribe high importance to things and people that lie outside the agent's own sphere of control. This thesis, associated with the ancient Greek and Roman Stoics, is first developed in a general, and deliberately preliminary, way. Dissecting a complex example of grief and mourning, I argue that emotions involve focus on an object and beliefs about the object. These beliefs are both evaluative and eudaimonistic, i.e. made from the viewpoint of the person's own most important goals and projects. While feelings and bodily states are typically involved in emotions, I argue that no specific feeling or bodily state should be included as a necessary element in the definition of a type of emotion, both because of the variety with which a single emotion is realized in different people and because of the fact that emotions can be non-conscious. Thus evaluation is central to defining a type of emotion (e.g. grief) in a way that feeling is not.